Content Marketing

Podcasts have been around for as long as we care to remember. Not only has podcasting seen a boom as of late, it’s become a go-to for learning and communications now that there is a rise in mobile usage made available for everyone.

Internet radio. Remember? It was a thing before streaming music services! Now the internet radio platform has been reborn as podcasts. They are all over the place. The reason is simple: with the democratisation of information, users are not just interested in listening to streaming music channels but also talks on certain topics. With the global access to smartphones with 3-4G, podcasts are easy to listen to while you are in travelling. But should you start and how to measure your podcast’s success?

IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY

As an internet marketer saying goes: you should choose the best platform for your content. Or, you should convert your content to each platform. Podcasts are not for everyone and every type of content. Video is a visual storytelling tool; social media channels are snaps of information and anthology and culmination of content. But podcasts are discussion platforms. You are talking so only pick podcast as a platform if you have something to say, more-over, if you have something to discuss with someone else. It’s a conversation platform, you can’t just have 1 guy talking to the microphone, alone.

Not all messages and campaigns and brands are able to enter podcasting. But if you are a thought leader, you have certain topics to discuss, then you can start thinking about getting a podcast.

Now this post is not about how to create an effective podcast but about how to measure it, once it is up there.

INTEREST AND LOYALTY – VALUE – ENDORSEMENT

Ultimately your podcast has one goal: make you more popular, therefore make your topic more popular. No matter you are a life coach talking about transformative changes, a stock broker talking about stock market or a marketer talking about business hacks – ultimately you want your topic (and you) to be more popular. Get the word out.

For a podcast, you have three ways to measure your popularity.

Interest and loyalty

This is the focus. You need to measure how many people are listening your podcast. Same as video channels, you have the same metrics.

How many people subscribed to your channel

How many people downloaded OR streamed your podcast

How many people listened your podcast at all

With these hard figures, you will get the idea how popular you are.

Now when we are speaking about how many people listened your podcast, we want to know not just how many people started to listen to your podcast but also how many people listened the whole session through. This shows loyalty for us because they care about your topic and found the discussion engaging and interesting.

Value

Now you know how many people are passively listening to your podcast but that’s not at all enough. You want to know that you bring value to their lives. Anytime you bring value there’s a big chance that people will thank you for it.

Saying “thanks” can come in different forms. Leaving a good review on your podcast. Commenting on your platform. Inviting you to collaborate. There are some hard figures and soft measurements that can tell you, you are bringing value to other’s table.

Endorsement

When you are really bringing value, you need to check how much of an impact you made. Users who listened to your podcast and already said “thanks” can endorse you on external channels. Check for social media referrals, social media mentions and your impact outside your owned channels. If you see many users sharing your newest podcast on Twitter, it means you made an impact and you are on the right track.

Book an on-demand Q&A session where we answer all further questions you may have about this write-up.

Go where your readers are – this is the main cause for using Facebook’s Instant Articles.

Everyone should become a media company – this is the mantra said by marketers for years now. No matter you are a brand, a company, ecommerce, you need to broadcast content to your readers. Facebook’s Instant Articles is a solution for broadcasters. But why should you use it and how to measure your performance?

What is Facebook Instant Articles?

Content on caffeine

If you have a blog or any platform where you usually publish content, you can use Facebook’s Instant Articles (FBIA). FBIA works like any other shared article on Facebook, the difference is that it is Instant and comes directly from your blog or any other broadcasting site you have. FBIA appear immediately on the Timeline, if the user clicks on it, there’s no waiting for load-up, it appears instantly on the device used for reading. It is also more interactive, responsive and has its own design and customized appearance.

Go where your readers are

Why you need to use it? It is simple. When you share a content on Facebook, let’s say your blog’s article shared on your Facebook page, users will less likely to click on it if it’s not an FBIA. It is slower, needs time to load-up and diverts the users out from Facebook. FBIA however lets them stay on Facebook, continue to browse on their own Timeline but in the meantime, lets the broadcaster (you) keep the sort-of-original branding of their company.

It is also a better solution to reach more people. Users don’t need to go to your site, they just consume your content straight from Facebook. In the end, it is better to share your content where your audience is.

How do you measure Facebook Instant Articles performance?

Insights that matter most

Facebook Instant Articles are articles shared through your Facebook Page so you can measure their performance directly on the Facebook Page’s Insights. Of course, these insights are just the ones that matter the most.

You measure your FBIA performance with three important metrics:

• Clicks: how many users clicked on the article.
• Time Spent: how much time spent on the reading of the article
• Scroll Depth: the amount of percentages users scrolled down in the article

If you think about it, these are the most important metrics to define your content’s performance. Comments and shares are measured as any Facebook updates’ metric obviously.

For most publishers, these insights however not enough. Also, most of the broadcasters have their own analytics ecosystem in place already. Fortunately, Facebook lets another analytics providers in.

Third-party integration

Most of the analytics platforms work the same: users add a tracking code to a digital property and the analytics platform tracks the activity on the property with the tracking code.

It works the same with Facebook Instant Articles. You can insert your analytics tracking code from most of the analytics platforms to your Facebook Instant Articles. Facebook supports almost any platforms, including Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Adobe, Nielsen, SimpleReach, ComScore and many more. There is also an API that you can use to track the metrics on your own.

Content that matters

Content distribution is a new trend in content marketing. It is simple why: content should be shared where your audience catches it. It is effortless and more efficient. With Facebook Instant Articles this is possible and you don’t need to compromise on performance measurement either.

Book an on-demand Q&A session where we answer all further questions you may have about this write-up.

No, I’m not talking about long holidays and presents. I’m talking about that time of the year to take a look back and appreciate. I’m talking about that time of the year when we take a look back and appreciate the days gone past and be thankful that they came to be instrumental in our progress.

In the case of Walter Analytics, we can definitely say that we’ve come a long way from where we started back in January of this year. We’ve undergone many changes and advanced our skills and knowledge; and while it’s true that there still a long way to go for the team, we’re very happy and hopeful that this change will continue in the following year.

In the spirit of taking a backtrack and looking back at our progress, we’ve chosen 10 of our most well-received content and hope that you find it not only entertaining but education as well.

Influencer marketing is highly relevant in today’s marketing standards. Influencers are the first ones who grab a product and do a review and make it viral. They control a considerable size of community and influence an even wider audience as well. Measuring their activity is possible but defining metrics for their influence is another story. In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics. [READ MORE]

Influencer marketing is highly relevant in today’s marketing standards. Influencers are the first ones who grab a product and do a review and make it viral. They control a considerable size of community and influence an even wider audience as well. Measuring their activity is possible but defining metrics for their influence is another story. In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics. [READ MORE]

In the recent years, big data has become a significant focus point for businesses. Gathering massive amounts of data is now routine for most of us. It’s not a question of whether or not it is important to collect information on your customers. The key points that should come to mind are the type of data to collect and analyse, and from there, the process to predict consumer behaviour based on patterns and trends derived from the data. Predictive analytics is on the rise, and now everyone can benefit from it. [READ MORE]

Although Virtual Reality is not exactly a platform for the masses, it is the most innovative approach to delivering content as of today. The platform, still in its early stages and loads of new creative ideas has already challenged the digital analytics. Virtual reality has the potential to redefine how we think about measuring the bread and butter of digital analytics: attention and action. This article helps you to understand the behind-the-scenes on this new trend. [READ MORE]

We have seen so many bad examples and sat through hour-long presentations on KPIs and measurement charts with a great set of data pieces and an endless number of slides. So we decided to show you the best way to present and report your data. This process is applicable to all kind of businesses and business cases with any analytics background and data coming from any measurement system. This simple process will help you get the best out from data. [READ MORE]

There are various A/B Testing tools available if you search around, most of which are paid software. But since not everyone is ready to shell out money just to test them out, we’ll highlight one of the known free tools around which is Google Analytics Content Experiments. [READ MORE]

Consumers prefer mobile over desktop when it comes to shopping or content consumption. Mobile referral traffic is taking over desktop usage. It is not a question of how important mobile is. The question is how to capitalise on mobile usage. Here are the most important trends in mobile advertising. [READ MORE]

Walter Analytics has worked with EmployEase for over two years enhancing Analytics and driving the digital growth of the business. This partnership has been a key driver of revenue growth for EmployEase and outlines our framework for working on Analytics with a client. [READ MORE]

Personalised content and design is about providing the best web experience to different target audiences. At the most basic implementation, personalisation is setting up marketing campaigns for different groups of users, with ads for different audiences linking to different audiences linking to landing pages optimised for that audience. At the more complex integration, it is the use of browser cookie information or other technology implementations to dynamically display optimised content and design for a site as a site loads, to audiences depending on previous behaviour or demographic information. [READ MORE]

We have seen the widespread adoption of A/B testing in large companies, with medium sized companies starting to make the move to incremental data-driven changes through A/B testing as well. For web insights, new features in Google Analytics include Universal Analytics and Enhanced Ecommerce, and more recently Demographic and Interest Segmenting, has meant greatly increased insights into the behavioural difference between different website users. So many changes in a market can be hard to grapple, and many businesses just don’t adapt at all. To ensure you remain competitive you must make a measured move to keep your marketing budget accountable, and new analytics insights now allow you to do just that. [READ MORE]

(5 min. read)

Thank you for being part of our 2016 and we hope that you continue to enjoy our content in the following year.

On behalf of the Walter Analytics team, happy holidays and may you have a good new year!

Video marketing has been increasingly important but often stated as a tool with high investment costs and low ROI. The reality could not be further from the truth. Here’s why:

Video can be a kick boost to your current marketing efforts. It builds a significant amount of trust; it is more engaging than any other platform, and it has a long-tail effect on your SEO and brand recognition compared nothing else. While it has a high investment cost compared to other content marketing options, it has the potential to generate improved ROI if it’s done right. We are here to help you with the groundwork on where to put your videos, how to create them cost-effectively and explain to you the benefits that you should look for when starting a video marketing campaign.

Why and Where You Need to Do Video Marketing

YouTube should be your basecamp platform on video marketing

YouTube’s popularity and ties with Google are not just the only reasons you need to produce videos, especially to YouTube. While Facebook and other social platforms have video capabilities and are getting more and more popular, they are highly relying on their very own “feed”. Once the community stops seeing the feed, the video ranks lower, and there’s little or to no organic growth in views. Meanwhile, YouTube’s recommendation-based system drives internal organic growth on the channel. YouTube is the clear winner on the long-tail effect in video, and their content is easily embeddable to any other platform.

SEO benefits are above anything

If your customers don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. A well-written review? How about a video demonstration or a how-to-use-it video? Which builds more trust, a live video demo or a long written text? There is no easier and consumable form of content than video. Videos also need more effort to create than any other form of content so it shows enthusiasm and dedication. It is also more shareable than any other form of content.

Video has higher retention and conversions

According to studies, 65% of video viewers watch ¾ of the videos, which cannot be said for those long text articles. Getting a message across to your audience cannot be easier through video. Video can drive higher conversions as well: email campaigns with embedded videos drive higher CTR than any other email campaigns. Video also drives seriously higher conversions in terms of leads than any other platforms.

Creating a video marketing campaign

Using text-to-video tools has never been easier

You don’t have the setup for a full-on video marketing plan in terms of infrastructure and team? Don’t worry, there are solutions for that. Tools like Vidooya or Animoto are helping with the process with text-to-video or simplified video templates. Though originally produced content will always over-perform templates, it is an excellent way to add some new features to your campaign and experiment with video storytelling before you jump on this wagon.

Encourage sharing, add thumbnails and understand the ecosystem

YouTube is simple to understand. When you create call-to-action sections in your content marketing campaigns, do the same in video but now with your own words and play. Just state to users to share your video and subscribe to your channel or put out a single thumbnail to create click-through to your site from the video. Video marketing is super straight-forward. Understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so naming, tagging and describing your video content via text is super important. Apart from practical options, YouTube also ranks the videos based on how long the videos encourage people to stay on the YouTube platform. The longer users watch your video – the better the search rankings you’ll have. Understand that YouTube has a long-term effect, users can subscribe to your channel. Encouraging users to subscribing to your channel is crucial.

Telling your story in a video

An excellent text-based article has an easy-to-follow structure. So does a video which has a superb storyboard. Sketch it up before you proceed and test the flow of your videos with some draft versions. Create value for your target group and tell your story visually. Experiment with the length of your videos and don’t be afraid to try out new forms of video content ideas live. Also, consider video as a channel where you not just engage with users but also convince them to visit your site.

Measuring your success

Metrics that you need to watch out to determine your video success

Video views

This is the most important metrics you need to track. Views can help you to determine how strong your content and topic is. It also helps you determines your most popular videos and the type of videos well-received by your audience.

Likes and dislikes

This is less important, but it is a good indicator how users receive your content. Obviously, you need to get a more positive vibe for each video you produce.

Watch time

This is not just important because you have a clue how much time users spent on your videos watching, but it also affects your YouTube search rankings.

Engagement metrics

Likes, shares, comments and favourites to your videos. All are critical and provide you with a basic idea on how your videos received by your users.

To recap, video is an engaging content format that may seem daunting to create but will prove rewarding on the long-term. It drives more leads, conversions and gets you more out from SEO than any other content platforms.

Measuring Your Customers’ Attention, Actions and Approval

You have created your content marketing plan, and you have published all your content, but you don’t know how to evaluate your success. In some cases, your KPIs might help you, but mostly they only show the end game of your content marketing, not the actual performance of your content. But how do evaluate your content marketing? There are three factors you need to consider measuring: attention, action and approval. Each factor gives you a decent outlook on your performance but combines them into one report; you will have an idea on how your content marketing generates leads for your campaign.

Know where your customers’ focus are and target them better

The hard and the soft figures: views and time

Getting attention is the most difficult part of any advertising campaign regardless of the platform for a company. With too much interfering noise on the internet, it is even harder if not impossible to gain attention. Also distinguishing ourselves from others is harder than ever. But you’ve finally managed to get that attention: customers are visiting your site. How do you measure their attention? To measure attention, you have two options: a hard and a soft figure.

The hard figure is your views. The basic user segmentations and site performance metrics are good indicators for attention measurement: page views, unique views, returning visits. On the bottom line: if your content performs well on the top level key figures, you have their attention. But that is just a simple yes or no. How do you evaluate further?

Soft figures can be helpful here. By measuring time spent on your site can get you an idea of how much attention is paid to your content. If you had minor flows of users who are bouncing off your site – bounce rate is also a significant indicator – then you can say: your content certainly raised some eyebrows but proved to be irrelevant in a matter of seconds. Time spent on site is the best indicator you can get to measure your attention meter.

The one-hit wonders and the real cult leaders

Depends on what you want, but there are two options you can have. Either you have a massive attention with a short timeframe or a modest but loyal community. When you see massive site performance figures but low time on site and high bounce rate then you are a one-off celebrity on the net who will disappear with the first new wave. If you have a more modest figure but high time on site and low bounce rate, then your community is loyal and really pays attention to you. Therefore, performance metrics for a site are a matter of context and correlations.

Let your customers interact with your products and know more on what they like

Setting your goals

To define your actions; first, you need to set your goals. Every campaign is different, and your goals should reflect your campaign’s outcomes. Engagement metrics, like likes, shares, comments are different, however, in some cases, your campaign’s goal can be a high engagement metric. Therefore, the actions will be your engagements: the number of likes, comments, shares and pins. But most of the campaign goals are more solid: getting a purchase (sale) or getting a signup (lead). You can set up campaign goals and funnels in your metrics system so, in the end, you will have a clear idea of how your content marketing campaign performs regarding actions. The number of sign ups, purchases, and registrations are solid figures.

Is interactivity an action?

It certainly is. The more options you have for users to interact, the more popular your site will be. There are hard figures for action-measurements: signups, purchases, registrations. But some customers want to make a purchase, subscribe or register only after fiddling around your site. So what are the soft figures for actions? Frequency, scroll depths, recirculation of content and browsing around your FAQ and other static content are also actions. They show that users are very interested in your content, but they just don’t feel they can make a final action. Analysing the soft figures for action can help you to get an overall picture of how the process goes on your site and where users are bouncing off or making a hard action. Implementing events to your site will also get you more insights: when do they click certain buttons or read more sections on your site?

This week we will show you how to evaluate your content marketing performance. Please join our weekly Q&A where we answer all of your questions.

Get your customers’ approval badge and generate more leads

I share this = I approve this

If you ask a content marketer on how content marketing performance can be measured in most cases, the first thing that should come to mind would be “engagement”. Shares, likes, comments, pins, follows and other social media engagement metrics. We also do believe these metrics are significant to measure your content performance but from an outcome perspective, this is the least important concerning your business.

When users engage with content, they meant to say “we approve this content.” Approval is critical as without approval; there’s no credibility.

The engagement food chain

Some metrics can measure engagement. But which one is more important than the others? It all depends on the depth of engagement. How much the users want to approve that content, what would be the depth of their connection to that content? Hitting a like, a favourite, a pin is easy. Hitting follow or comment requires more, however. Sharing or retweeting something; however, that means that particular user is truly behind that content, and the approval rating is the highest possible. Sharing other users’ content on your channels is the best thing any brand or company can want.

Evaluating your content marketing: The big picture

We hope that we have helped to deliver the full big picture on how to evaluate content marketing performance. Engagement metrics are not enough; you also need to measure the outcomes of your content and the rate of attention generated by your content. From there, you can paint the full user journey to your content marketing and evaluate the process, gather some insights on each stage and in the end: perform better.